| name | incident-triage-runbook |
| description | The SRE team's runbook for triaging production latency and error-rate incidents. Use this whenever investigating an incident, a latency spike, elevated error rates, or when asked "what caused X" about a production service. |
Incident triage
If you change the order below, say why in #sre.
Order of operations
- Pull deploys for the last 6h. Don't open the log first.
- Line the deploy timestamps up against
p99_latency_ms / error_rate for the paged service. State the gap ("deploy 14:31, p99 moves 14:33").
- If a deploy lines up: pull the diff, read it. Check for the stuff in the next section.
- Then grep the log to confirm. Don't grep to fish.
- No deploy lines up → check
db_pool_utilization across checkout/cart/auth/inventory, then upstream deps.
Things that have burned us
In rough order of how often:
- per-row query where there used to be a batch
- cache decorator removed "temporarily"
- new query, no index
- blocking call in an async handler
- retry loop with no backoff
Write-up
One line at the bottom:
Root cause: <sha> — one sentence on the mechanism.
If it wasn't a deploy, put the component or upstream dep where the sha goes (db-primary, stripe-api, whatever). Still one sentence.
Everything above that line is evidence. Keep it short; the long version goes in the postmortem doc.
